A Million Dollar Scotch, You Heard That Right

Caviar and champagne in your private yacht while sailing around the Greek islands of Santorini?

A 16th century Scottish castle?

Watching the sun go down on the Italian coast of Amalfi while traveling in your personal jet?

A Lamborghini Aventador with a custom chrome paint job? — There’s so much that you could do with a million dollars.

Leaving all of that aside, a private collector from Asia bought The 60-year-old Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 over a phone call from Bonhams auction house fairly recently for a whopping 1.1 million dollars.

Accurately nicknamed as the Rolls Royce of Malts, whiskies such as The Macallan are collectors’ items. It is their rarity which hikes up the price to such an exorbitant amount; whiskeys like these will never actually be drunk, they are an object of beauty in their own right, so much so that a specialist at the auctioneer’s office has gone on record to say that the bottle is a museum collectible. That being said, anyone capable of spending a million dollars for a bottle of whisky might as well drink it. The buyer’s identity has not been revealed for privacy concerns, but Bonhams notified that he was of Asian origin and made the bid over a phone call.

What is being widely described as the Holy Grail in the world of whisky is one of the rarest and most desirable bottles of single malt ever produced. Put up for sale in Edinburgh, The Macallan Valerio Adami 1926 was displayed atop a beautifully designed cabinet and covered in tartan. The Scottish auction house sold the bottle at a bid of 700,000 pounds with an added sales premium of 148,000 pounds, roughly translating to a whopping 1.1 million dollars. With this, the auction house now holds the record for auctioning the three most valuable whisky bottles ever.

The Macallan Valerio Adami was distilled in 1926 and kept in its maturation cask until 1986, which is when it was bottled. At that time, only 24 of these were made, with their respective labels designed by two incredibly famous pop artists— Peter Blake designed 12 of them, while the Valerio Adami label was affixed on the rest of them, one of which was sold at Edinburgh last week.

The bottle is said to have been initially bought by Bonhams from the Macallan distillery for an undisclosed amount in 1994. It’s not really known as to how many of them still exist but reports cite that one of them was destroyed in 2011 in an earthquake in Japan, while another one was opened and consumed.

It is absolutely understandable as to why whisky’s being sold at such outrageous and sky-high rates. Interestingly, right behind vintage cars and fine art, whisky is the third most popular alternative investment during phases of economic uncertainty and stock market unpredictability. What more, its appreciation value has been more than gold in recent years!

Evan Williams: The Man and His Blend

As a young boy in Georgian Britain, Welshman Evan Williams dreamt of green hills and pristine lands. Born in Dale, Pembrokshire, his ambition, and an unquenchable thirst for adventure that was characteristic of the era, would lead him to the shores of North America.